This report was originally published on March 20.
By Joshua Tom, Legal Director, ACLU of Mississippi
“Arrested. Black. Male.”
These are the words that have been pre-filled on a cover sheet
to the Madison County Sheriff’s Department Narcotics Unit’s case files.
All other fields have been left blank. These words tell the story of
racially biased policing in the county that begins before officers even
go into the community.
The internal racism of the department
represented in this form is just one piece of a larger body of
compelling evidence that the sheriff’s department has a culture of
racism that threatens Madison County’s Black community.
In June of, 2009, current Sheriff Randall Tucker, while a deputy under former Sheriff Toby Trowbridge, received and forwarded a racist email
titled, “White Pride.” It contained the statements, “when I call you
Nigger, Kike, Towel head, Sand-nigger, Camel Jockey, Beaner, Gook, or
Chink . . . You call me a racist.” The email concludes by encouraging
the reader to express support for its sentiments by forwarding it along,
which Sheriff Tucker did.
The ACLU of Mississippi, along with its co-counsel at Simpson Thacher
& Bartlett LLP and the ACLU’s national office, uncovered these and
other documents during six months of legal discovery before proceeding
to file a motion for class certification on March 14, 2018, in Brown v. Madison County.
In the case, we sued Madison County and its sheriff’s department for
operating a policing program that targets Black people on the basis of
race.
The problem, however, runs deeper — much deeper — than racist sheriff emails.
Click here for the full article.
Source: ACLU
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